Kirubhakar Purushothaman

Baahubali, KGF and Salaar’s success has set a trend: films increasingly become hype instruments for their heroes. The template is now painfully familiar: a stranger arrives in town, bewildered by the hero’s omnipresent worship. He then meets another archetype: the hypeman, clearly of the land, dispenses worldly wisdom like a street philosopher. The stranger, suitably elitist and condescending, serves as the audience surrogate. The hype rural man becomes the narrator. In Peddi, Boman Irani gets the thankless honour of the uber-cool stranger, dragged through a dense forest by the hypeman just to hear the legend of Peddi (Ram Charan).

Over the years, Tamil cinema has trained the mass audience to always root for the loser. For example, Maan Karate’s protagonist, Peter (Sivakarthikeyan), is the poster boy for this brand of hero. In essence, Peter has no redeeming qualities. He is a lazy and incompetent bloke who lives off a gang that has a premonition that he will win a boxing contest. For a villain, the film features a character who has toiled his entire life to become a professional boxer. Yet, the film encourages the audience to back the hero because he is supposed to be relatable to the masses. Isn’t it easy to imagine a person winning in life without any effort?

What makes Vignesh Shivan an interesting filmmaker is his relentless pursuit of packaging what an irreverent Gen Z would call boomerish as an ultra-modern ‘sheesh’… something even an unaware Gen Beta would lap up as a perfectly in-vogue emotion. Poda Podi is about a modern dancer whose husband eventually convinces her that family rearing matters more than her dream of winning dance competitions. Naanum Rowdy Dhaan was a cool story of a pure-hearted gentleman, now called out for being a stalker. Kaathuvaakula Rendu Kaadhal is about a polyamorous hero whose love for both heroines is so pure he doesn’t consummate the relationship with either. With Love Insurance Kompany, Vignesh Shivan has taken this righteous hero into a future where love has been utterly commodified — and it is up to him to teach his lover, and the world, what true love is.

What if you have no one to die for but are put on a mission to save everyone… and in a sense, everything in the universe? Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling) of Project Hail Mary finds himself in such a predicament. Actually, he doesn’t even know he is. When he wakes up from an induced coma, Grace finds himself in a spaceship light years away from home. With his crew dead and his memory inching back to him due to the retrograde amnesia, Grace has to figure out why he is in the middle of space floating in a ship headed to Tau Ceti, a relatively nearby star to the Solar system–just 12 light years away (Didn’t I say relative) from home. Grace slowly remembers himself as a school teacher, a nerd, a loner, and a norm-defying molecular biologist, but what he doesn’t seem to understand or believe is why he would sign up for this one-way trip to save the world when he doesn’t even have one soul to care about.

From Disney’s Snow White to our own Vidaathu Karuppu, the evil grandma stereotype shines, making an old woman the face of terror and crudeness. Indian TV and its serials have furthered this trope of this evil old matriarch harassing the hapless daughter-in-law. On the other hand, there’s another popular archetype of a benevolent old woman, who “melts like a candle” to produce light for those around them. Manormama has been the quintessential choice of Tamil filmmakers for this cardboard cutout. The scene from Shankar’s Gentleman, of her telling her son (Arjun Sarja), “Naan irukaen pa” (“I’m there for you”). She is the all-giving mother, and men are supposed to find her godly love and care in their potential mates.

In many ways, Gandhi Talks feels like a spiritual remake of Kamal Haasan’s Pushpaka Vimana (1987), also released in Tamil as Pesum Padam — a silent film about a struggling, unemployed man who takes a shortcut to wealth and high life before returning to honesty and struggle.